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6 Terabyte Hard Drive Round-Up: WD Red, WD Green and Seagate Enterprise 6TB
MojoKid writes The hard drive market has become a lot less sexy in the past few years thanks to SSDs. What we used to consider "fast" for a hard drive is relatively slow compared to even the cheapest of today's solid state drives. But there are two areas where hard drives still rule the roost, and that's overall capacity and cost per gigabyte. Since most of us still need a hard drive for bulk storage, the question naturally becomes, "how big of a drive do you need?" For a while, 4TB drives were the top end of what was available in the market but recently Seagate, HGST, and Western Digital announced breakthroughs in areal density and other technologies, that enabled the advent of the 6 Terabyte hard drive. This round-up looks at three offerings in the market currently, with a WD Red 6TB drive, WD Green and a Seagate 6TB Enterprise class model. Though the WD drives only sport a 5400RPM spindle speed, due to their increased areal density of 1TB platters, they're still able to put up respectable performance. Though the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 6TB (also known as the Constellation ES series) drive offers the best performance at 7200 RPM, it comes at nearly a $200 price premium. Still, at anywhere from .04 to .07 per GiB, you can't beat the bulk storage value of these new high capacity 6TB HDDs.
Awfully long summary to say "you can haz 6TB HD"
Fastest: Seagate.
Best Warranty: Seagate.
Best Cache: WD Red....or the Seagate...the article conflicts between the first two pages.
Cheapest: WD Green.
Seagate notables: Full drive encryption available at a firmware level. AF and Legacy disks are separate models.
WD Red notables: 5400RPM spindle speed.
WD Green notables: None - nothing distinguishable from the Red drive, except a shorter warranty.
Sandra Benchmark results:
Seagate: 167W/168R.
WD Red: 138W/138R.
WD Green: 133W/133R.
Atto results are shown on a messy graph with no clear numbers, but Seagate wins that benchmark as well (albeit with a closer delta).
HD Tune Pro results basically reflect the transfer rates from above. Seek times for the Seagate are 11ms for both write and read, with the WD Red having a 16/17 set of scores and the WD Green being less than an integer higher. Burst rates are again better on the Seagate (276R/304W), with the WD Green being 217/220 and the Red being 217/218.
Crystal mark, basically the same numbers.
Futuremark, prettier graphs with wonderful titles like "video editing" and "importing pictures", with the results a closer race, each drive having its own task at which it wins (even the green). Not much different from the 3TB numbers, and not that much different from each other.
There were no mentions of reliability metrics; presumably none of the disks failed during benchmarking. Consult your usual biases and experience regarding which drive is likely to fail or not - this was strictly a benchmark review, and shockingly, the enterprise-grade drive with the highest rotational speed and biggest cache that costs the most money got the best score.
Is anyone with significant amounts of data not caching their frequently accessed data on SSD?
*looks around*
*sheepishly half-raises hand*
Replace bay 1 with a SATA board that can hold 4 SSD drive cards. It's what I did. OS and cache in bay one and 3 bays for 3 6TB drives. works great.
http://www.amazon.com/SATA-Dua...
Dual port version. I found a 4 port version and have it stuffed with 4 128gb SSD drives. works great.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Having experienced SSD failures.. NO you cant read from them. SSD drives do a catastrophic failure, you do not get a chance to read from them before full failure, they just do a complete fail and all data is gone forever.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
OK, I have a 5TB RAID array 50% full of music and a 3TB (soon to be upgraded to 4) full of videos.
These drives run quite fast enough for me to stream their contents - why would I want to cache them onto an SSD?
So I'm raising my hand but not sheepishly.
Hey, the S looked like it was crossed out, OK?
Bert
I've seen in general, three lines of HDDs. Basic desktop/laptop drives, premium desktop/laptop, and enterprise grade drives which are designed to all wind up at the same firmware level to minimize issues when in RAID controllers.
However, a "NAS" hard drive? Is this something a step down from enterprise drives, but designed for a device like a Drobo, or some other solution that really doesn't care about background drives, uses RAID 5 or 6, and expects drives to blow out over time?
Are the Red drives designed to be paired or run in RAID arrays specifically, as opposed to the Green line that is made for power savings?
I always thought that the NAS/RAID drives allowed Time Limited Error Recovery to be specified, which would prevent RAID controllers from interpreting a long error recovery interval as a drive timeout and erroring out that drive and removing it from the array. The NAS and Enterprise drives do allow this option to be set.
Are the Red drives designed to be paired or run in RAID arrays specifically, as opposed to the Green line that is made for power savings?
Pretty much yes. The Red have better vibration tolerance, and the firmware is tweaked to fit a NAS workload better. For example, a Green will park the head as quickly as it can which for always-on machines can lead to a Green disk reaching its "Load/Unload Cycle" tolerance in months and die prematurely. The Red will not do this.
There's also a difference in how they handle unreadable sectors and such errors which makes the Red play nicer with hardware RAID controllers. An unrecoverable read error in a Green can cause the whole array to go down.
Once the electrons are out of the gate, the data is -gone-. No amount of recovery is going to do the job, ever.
This is my biggest concern with SSDs. Yes, they can have a longer MTBF, but when they go, they take your data with it, making backups more imperative.
The ironic thing? Since SSDs make the need for backups that much more urgent [1] We have far fewer tools for backup than we did on PCs 20 years ago (when an average user could get a desktop tape drive, a ZIP drive, removable SCSI hard disk, or other media.) For non-enterprise backups, we have external hard disks, USB flash drives, and offsite file servers [2]. Even optical drives are becoming uncommon. External hard disks and USB flash drives are not archival media. They -might- hold their data, but are not warrantied for it.
It would be nice if some company could make an appliance that did a disk-to-disk-to-removable-media appliance. The backup program would copy data to the device, and data would stay on a set of RAID protected HDDs, as well as eventually copied to removable media [3]. A bare metal restore would be easy -- if the appliance is connected via USB, have it present a DVD-ROM with the OS or recovery software. If on a LAN, have a USB flash drive or image that would get a machine booted enough to find the appliance and start a restore.
[1]: With HDDs, a recovery from a format isn't too difficult. SSDs usually follow up a format with a TRIM command, zeroing (or more exactly, writing 1s) to all the blocks, either right then, or as the drive feels like it. "Unformatting" a SSD is pretty much impossible with a modern OS that does proper TRIM commands. Add a decently smart encryption system like BitLocker that zeroes out the sectors with master volume keys multiple times, and it can almost be assured that a delete or a format results in data forever gone.
[2]: Cloud storage seems like a working idea, but it can take a good while to fetch lost documents and rebuild the entire OS and machine. With a local backup solution, most backup programs offer a simple bare-metal restore, no Internet access needed. There is also the fact that a machine needs to have the OS, updates, and the cloud provider's software loaded and logged in before a restore can happen. Having the OS local means a complete bare metal restore is a "press 'restore' and walk off" action.
[3]: Tape comes to mind. The main advantage of tape (or offline media in general) is that some hacker who gets access to the SAN controller can't just purge all media with a single command. A lot of companies have excellent replication of SAN data, but that replication will happily replicate the "delete everything, including all snapshots" as well. Plus, tapes can be physically set read-only where only a reflash of the tape drive could allow the cartridge to be written to. I wish someone could make a consumer level tape drive, perhaps using a SSD as a buffer to prevent shoe-shining. There is a Thunderbolt based tape drive for Macs by mTape for $3699. If someone made a product like this (but a price more palatable to consumers) that could tolerate USB 3 (or maybe even USB 2), and work well under Windows, Linux, and other operating systems, they might have a best seller. Especially with the fact that intruders now have moved from just accessing data to actively modifying and destroying it, so backups are even more crucial than they were before this year.
In fact, I'd say that with the ease data is permanently destroyed, a consumer level backup appliance might be quite a seller.
The main difference is the WD RED drives will error out quickly from an unrecoverable read error where as a typical desktop drive will retry the read, up to a minute, yes, a minute worth of retries which will confuse most RAID controllers into thinking the drive is bad (i.e. gone offline) and forcing an array rebuild. The idea being if you're not running RAID, it is okay to go through heroic efforts trying to trace difference paths over the track to get one good read out of the data before marking the sector bad.
Of course, if you're running RAID, the best thing is to fail the read quickly and rebuild the sector from parity.